Dr. Julian Grant
Over the past few weeks, I have been getting underway on a local history project aiming to document the history of Leith St. Andrew’s Church. This blog post is the second in a series sharing findings and reflections from the project as I go along. Here I will focus on what I have learned from the first stages of archival research.
With the help of members of the church, I have been digging into a rich array of archival sources that provide a vivid and fascinating record of the life of a congregation and its wider community. These sources also attest to the careful work that went into chronicling and preserving the shared history of Leith St. Andrew’s Church for the benefit of future generations. As one era for the building ends and another era begins, this project seeks to follow in those earlier footsteps by shining a light on what came before.
How Does Archival Research Work?
To access the church archives, I unlock a door at the base of the church tower and climb a steep and narrow spiral staircase up and up into the heavens. There is no electricity here in the “tower room”, but three arched windows look out onto the constant traffic of Duke Street. Daylight streams in through the cobwebs and touches upon boxes full of old documents and artefacts. There are silver Communion vessels and fine linen cloths for the Communion table, pamphlets written for centenaries and special ceremonies, Kirk Session minutes, newspaper clippings, photographs and blueprints and hymnals and hundreds of other remnants from many decades of the life of a church. Perhaps most precious is The Story of Leith St. Andrew’s, a wonderful church history written by a member of the congregation in 1981. It is cold up here, so I bundle up in warm clothes and carefully sift through the boxes.
You might need a microscope and a decent grasp of Scottish ecclesiastical history to make sense of the handwritten timeline pictured above. It maps out the trajectory of the churches of South Leith parish from the Reformation to (almost) the present day. Unique documents like this helped me piece together an understanding of the complex historical background of Leith St. Andrew’s.
A Timeline of Leith St. Andrew’s Church
The congregation which exists today was formed from the gradual consolidation of four different churches that stand between the Water of Leith and Leith Links. In order of when they were built, these are:
- Junction Road Church, Great Junction Street (built 1825, closed 2009)
- St. Andrew’s Place Church, St. Andrew’s Place (1827-1973)
- St. Thomas’ Church, Mill Lane (1840-1975)
Leith St. Andrew’s Church, corner of Easter Road and Lochend Road (1881-present)
The density of churches within such a small area reflects the importance of religious life within society until very recently. But it also reflects a series of schisms, secessions, unions and re-unions within Scotland’s Protestant churches. These four congregations co-existed for much of the 19th and 20th centuries, each home to a vibrant community and filling a particular spiritual niche.
The building we now call Leith St. Andrew’s was built in 1881. It has its roots in the Great Disruption of 1843, when dissenting members of the Church of Scotland split away to form the Free Church. This split was driven by frustration with the state’s perceived encroachment upon the spiritual independence of the Church. In Leith, Free Church dissenters left the parish church on the Kirkgate and built a church of their own on John’s Place. After being displaced by a disastrous fire in 1880, they moved to their magnificent new building on the corner of Easter Road and Lochend Road.
Originally called the South Leith Free Church, the church changed its name several times following the shifting landscape of local and national religious organisations. It became the South Leith United Free Church in 1900 and then Claremont Kirk in 1929 after the re-union of the United Free Church and the wider Church of Scotland. This name lasted until 1973, when Claremont Kirk united with the St. Andrew’s Place congregation and became Leith St. Andrew’s.
The other churches that have been folded into Leith St. Andrew’s each have interesting histories of their own. St. Andrew’s Place Church stands next to Leith Primary School on the Links. It was built in 1827 in the wake of an earlier split from the Church of Scotland (the Anti-Burgher faction of the Secession Church, in case you are interested!). The building fell derelict following the union with the Claremont Kirk in 1973, before being carefully restored as a Hindu Mandir and cultural centre from 1989 onwards. More recently, Leith St. Andrew’s welcomed the congregation of St. Thomas’ – Junction Road Church on Great Junction Street in 2009. Originally built in 1825 as a Relief Church, the Junction Road Church had earlier absorbed St. Thomas’ Church on Mill Lane in 1975 as their congregations dwindled. St. Thomas’ became a Sikh temple, while Junction Road Church is now home to Mohiuddin Jamia mosque and education centre. In their new roles, these buildings continue to serve as important social and religious hubs for some of the more recent immigrant communities which form part of Leith’s contemporary tapestry.
A Community Church
The church archives also give insights into the decades of work and creativity that went into building and sustaining a strong community. I was intrigued by the pamphlet from the Church Bazaar of 1901 pictured above. Featuring dozens of stalls, events and performances, the Bazaar was held in order to raise funds for important building works on the church. These included the completion of the steeple, the construction of a hall, and the installation of heating and electric lighting systems. Visitors to the Bazaar were promised entertainment such as a “hat-trimming competition for gentlemen” and “gramophone selections at intervals during the evening” – the turn-of-the-century equivalent of a DJ set! It must have been a roaring success. It allowed for improvements to the building in 1902 that were crucial in ensuring its elegance and usefulness up to the present day.
Some of the most moving discoveries from my archival research are the ways that the congregation has commemorated and grieved together in times of hardship. The Story of Leith St. Andrew’s includes a poem written in memory of Thomas K. Littlejohn, the church organist, choirmaster and teacher of music, who was killed in action in April 1918:
God willed him a musician
Lit his soul with love and fun
Made him mirror all the masters
But he died beside a gun.
Died who might have served by living
Served as serve the stars and sun
Warming hearts and coaxing beauty
Yet he died beside a gun.
[…] Oh ye maddened men of Europe
Come behold what ye have done
You have dragged him from the organ
And have flung him to the gun.
Thomas Littlejohn was one of 53 members of the church who were killed in the First World War. Through these words preserved in the church archives, we gain a sense of the cherished and talented individual who inspired the poet to put pen to paper. We can also witness a spirit of grief-stricken anger directed towards the injustice and cruelty which cost him and so many others their lives. Memorials inside and outside the building commemorate those members of the church and the local Boys’ Brigade battalion who died in the First and Second World Wars. These markers of shared sadness also form part of the fabric of the church community: a network of solidarity and support during hard times as well as good.
My archival research has also illuminated the deeply interwoven place of the church within its surrounding community. The poster you see above comes from a church effort to knit warm woolen hats for the sailors who came in and out of the port of Leith – an appropriate activity for this ancient maritime burgh. It is worth a close look at its whimsical sketches and puns: “Comfy Dalkeith?” “Naw – Nitten!” and “Pullover!” (says the cop)… “Naw, a wooly hat” (says the driver). The poster reminds us that Leith St. Andrew’s has served not only the needs of the congregation but also of much wider circles.
This point is driven home by the sheer number of local groups that have used the building over the years. This includes “uniformed organisations” such as the Boys’ Brigade, the Life Boys, the Girl Guides and the Brownies. It has also been home to a full size concert band, a nursery programme, a foodbank, and a youth dance group, among others. Even though the building’s time as the host of an active religious congregation is coming to an end, the Leith St. Andrew’s Trust hopes that its role as a space for members of the wider community to come together will continue.
Next steps
I hope that this post has given some sense of the breadth and richness of the source material I have been working with thus far. Perhaps it has also encouraged you to think about the many roles that the church has played for different people through the years, and how some of those might be maintained and encouraged in the future. In the next stage of the project, I will be carrying out oral history interviews with community members about their memories of the church. I am looking forward to learning from this more personal, people-centred stage of the research, and equally eager to share insights from those interviews with you on this blog.